Behaviour
The Yellow-crowned Bishop eats insects, grain, and seeds. It lives in flocks with both males and females. In non-breeding seasons the flocks may contain weavers and sparrows. The call is a "high-pitched, rasping, buzzing swizzling, somewhat insect-like: zzzzzzz, zzit, zzit, zzzz". Nesting is November–May, peaking from December–March, and males are polygynous, but the males do not breed in colonies. Each male will build two or more oval nests with a top opening, attracting a female to each nest by flaring their yellow feathers and display flights. Yellow-crowned Bishop are gregarious and nomadic, wandering to breeding areas in response to rainfall. Nests are built among standing stems of grasses or sedges or shrubs. Bent over stems of live grass help hide the nest. The female will lay from two to four white eggs. Egg incubation is done solely by the females and lasts 12–14 days. Newborn chicks leave the nest after 11–13 days and are fully independent after an additional five weeks.
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“The quality of moral behaviour varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“The methodological advice to interpret in a way that optimizes agreement should not be conceived as resting on a charitable assumption about human intelligence that might turn out to be false. If we cannot find a way to interpret the utterances and other behaviour of a creature as revealing a set of beliefs largely consistent and true by our standards, we have no reason to count that creature as rational, as having beliefs, or as saying anything.”
—Donald Davidson (b. 1917)
“I cannot be much pleased without an appearance of truth; at least of possibility—I wish the history to be natural though the sentiments are refined; and the characters to be probable, though their behaviour is excelling.”
—Frances Burney (1752–1840)